Reviews
Chris Mugan
Childlike wonder is a rare emotion at a gig, so gasps of delight are doubly jolting as the first images appear to float out of the mammoth screen behind the stage and float over our heads. These are notes of musical notation that cascade from a car radio at the moment when the dial shifts in "Autobahn", the track where Kraftwerk’s concepts first properly coalesced and that gave their breakthrough album its title. The German electronica pioneers are to play 1974’s Autobahn in full as they begin an eight-night residency revisiting much of their back catalogue in order.It is also their first Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Thank heavens, at least, for the committed performances of a cast headed by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Mr and Mrs H, two classy talents in a film that otherwise feels as if it was made for some Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
mark.hudson
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.Those images were pretty well-known then. They’re infinitely better known now. The "Ingres" woman with violin marks on her back (pictured below, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924), the pale-faced Parisian beauty with the African mask, the solarised profile of Lee Miller Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
If by the end of a show you’ve both wowed and ouched out loud, I would declare it’s safe to say you’re getting your money's-worth. Tango Fire's new show at the Peacock Theatre, Flames of Desire, does all the above and more. In fact it could be described as the West End equivalent to a supermarket deal the average savvy consumer simply can’t resist – three for the price of one: exquisite dancers, a charismatic chanteur, and an electrifying band.The dancers are 10 of Argentina’s best, headed by the dancer/in-house choreographer German Cornejo. The singer, Jesus Hidalgo, has the charm and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last weekend it was the 50th anniversary of an important event in postwar Welsh history. In early February 1963 the Welsh Language Society – Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg – protested for the first time about the right of Welsh speakers to live their lives in Welsh. At Pont Trefechan in Aberystwyth 500 people gathered on Saturday to mark the event and the same number came back on Sunday to Y Bont (The Bridge), a commemorative outdoor play devised by the Welsh-language National Theatre, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru.The ball has been energetically pushed up the hill ever since, but some things don’t Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prehistory – human life before written language - enters art’s mainstream with this seminal and eye-opening exhibition. This one-off show, amplified by excellent labelling and atmospheric lighting, is enormously ambitious: the largest anthology of portable prehistoric European art there has ever been, unprecedented in its scope with artefacts from museums in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, homes to the greatest of the sites. (Although 40,000 years ago Britain was attached by land to the rest of Europe, the place was evidently too cold for human migration and survival.) Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix. The message is thus: while it's certainly not averse to plundering the fridge for cheese, for the most part I Give It a Year puts the emphasis on broad, bawdy comedy.Hastening through the schmaltz, the film begins with a courtship Read more ...
Heather Neill
A little man takes on Authority and fails. A little man dons a colourful uniform, complete with boots and spiked helmet, and he becomes Authority. Carl Zuckmayer wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power.Wilhelm Voigt, the real-life subject of the drama, had his moment of fame as the ersatz Captain of Grenadier Reserves in 1906. An anti-militarist aware of the growing Nazi threat and declared “half Jewish” because one of his grandfathers was Jewish, Zuckmayer was clearly writing about his own time as much as the early 1900s. He described his satire – in Read more ...
David Nice
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent Garden’s new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and allows him to inflect every move his characters make with the right emotion.His basic premise begins at the end: with the older, more dislocated Onegin and Tatyana aching their way back to that time in a mid-19th century adolescence when happiness was so close. That makes it clear at the start that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Plays about plays are often touched by theatrical magic. This is certainly the case with Timberlake Wertenbaker’s masterpiece, first staged in 1988, and now revived by the same director, Max Stafford-Clark, who originally eased it into the world. And, just as a quarter of a century ago the play felt like a protest against the moronic anti-arts prejudices of the Thatcher gang, so today it once again asserts the power of theatre as against the crippled vision of Arts Council cuts.Although Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint company was a victim of arts cuts in 2011 — when its subsidy was cut by more Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
There’s an episode in the first season of Mad Men in which the ad execs of Sterling Cooper brainstorm a campaign for Richard Nixon, just prior to the 1960 presidential election. Dramatic irony being what it is, it’s a rare opportunity to watch our anti-heroes working on a pitch (based chiefly around smear tactics) that is predestined to fail. By contrast, Pablo Larraín’s No chronicles how a team of ad men in 1980s Chile, led by Gael Garcia Bernal’s maverick René, put together a campaign to topple a dictator that we know will succeed against all odds.No is the third film in a loose trilogy Read more ...